RUNNIGHEAD: New Telecommunication Services

New Telecommunication Services

New Telecommunication Services

Introduction

Web is becoming a programmable platform and Mashup is emerging as a brand-new service composition paradigm. However, one of the biggest blocking issues with the universal adoption of Mashup is lack of a well designed inventory of mashable services for users to create mashups effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel and practical method to conceptualize, model and design the mashable services in a specific domain. Firstly, through analyzing current mashups theoretically, we present a conceptual model of mashable service, which describes not only a service, but also the relationships with other services. As a result, the services and their relationships in a domain can be formalized as a directed graph, in which vertex represent services and edges represent relationships. Furthermore, a Mashup can be modeled as one of its sub graph. Secondly, we present a novel and practical method to identify and design the inventory of mashable services through mapping the well-known Entity Relationship Model to mashable service model. The inventory of mashable services enables business users to create mashups for their situational problems effectively (Simmen, 2008). Finally, the proposed method is applied to a real-world domain to show the feasibility and effectiveness.

Discussion

Nowadays, web has become an ultimate open ecosystem in which everyone can make both contributions and consumptions. With countless services published every day in various forms, including Feeds, REST APIs and Widgets, etc., web is becoming a programmable platform. At the time of this writing, over 140,000 gadgets have been published at Google and the number is increasing exponentially every day. This profound change is driven partially by the requirements of easily composing the vast pool of existing high value data and services into new situational applications or new business insights (Tatemura, 2008). Within all the emerging Web 2.0 technologies, Mashup as a brand-new service composition paradigm has been a widely-accepted solution for the situational problems. Wikipedia describes a Mashup as "a website or an application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience". Furthermore, Mashup empowers the Line-Of-Business (LOB) person to create the situational applications by self-service. For example, it can help a finance manager use aggregated, filtered, and combined data from across divisional accounting instances for intermediate or mid-term compliance and financial reporting summaries. There are already some commercial Mashup platforms like IBM Mashup Center, which is an end-to-end enterprise Mashup platform that enables the rapid creation, sharing, and discovery of reusable application building blocks (widgets, feeds, mashups) that can be easily assembled into new applications or leveraged within existing applications, delivering lower development costs, rapid return-on-investment (ROI), quick delivery of applications, and greater productivity (Wang, 2005).

Mashable services are those services which can cooperate with others and be easily integrated into a Mashup. They may have some data dependencies or have inherent semantic relationships with their correlated services. As the basic cell and element of a Mashup, mashable services play an inevitably important role. The overall well-designed inventory of mashable services will ...